This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.
Men |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
There is no such thing as a true account of anything.
People |
There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair.
Bitterness | People |
The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
But what has been often urged as a consideration of much more weight, is not only the opinion of the better sort, but the general consent of mankind to this great truth; which I think could not possibly have come to pass, but from one of the three following reasons: either that the idea of a God is innate and co-existent with the mind itself; or that this truth is so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason in persons of the most ordinary capacities; or, lastly, that it has been delivered down to us through all ages by a tradition from the first man. The Atheists are equally confounded, to whichever of these three causes we assign it.
Better | Desire | Good | Impression | Order | Time | Will | Words |
In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.
Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Back to event the sun and the widespread voices, not the usual noises door.
Come, God -- Bromius, Bacchus, Dionysus -- burst into life, burst into being, be a mighty bull, a hundred-headed snake, a fire-breathing lion. Burst into smiling life, oh Bacchus!
That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.
The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable, is that which rages in the place of dearest love.
In order to keep that temper which is so difficult, and yet so necessary to preserve, you may please to consider, that nothing can be more unjust or ridiculous, than to be angry with another because he is not of your opinion. The interests, education, and means by which men attain their knowledge, are so very different, that it is impossible they should all think alike; and he has at least as much reason to be angry with you, as you with him. Sometimes, to keep yourself cool, it may be of service to ask yourself fairly, what might have been your opinion, had you all the biasses of education and interest your adversary may possibly have?
Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.